Eger Journal of English Studies X (2010) 39–56
Orwell and Women’s Issues – a Shadow over the
Champion of Decency
Ivett Császár
For reasons, which, in a sense, can be traced back to his childhood through
autobiographical works like “Such, Such Were the Joys”, but which ultimately
remain obscure, George Orwell developed into a man much at odds with the
world at large. Discontent launched him on the path of “democratic socialism”
and he became a spokesman for the underdog and those living under political
oppression. The abuse of capitalism oriented him towards working men and the
fear of totalitarianism made him speak out for intellectual liberty and this fight
ensured him the way to the pedestal. However, he did not realise that beside
political tyranny there are much more subtle and pervasive ways of manipulating
our consciousness, the rigid delimitation of gender roles being such a social
construct. His ambivalent attitude towards women and feminism, his
homophobia, glorification of war and an eagerness to take part in it as a
requirement of a man’s man, his public-minded oeuvre and his intense
patriotism evoked by the Second World War all fall into the pattern of a
traditional concept of masculinity, not tolerating behaviour trespassing on its
well-established borderlines. A close reading of some relevant pieces of his
otherwise huge corpus of journalism will show that in spite of some attempts to
acquit him of feminist charges and provide evidence of an evolution of his
attitude, his essentially male-centred and patriarchal outlook remained
unchanged, displaying a grasp of human relations along gender lines that leaves
much to be desired.
The Icon of Masculine Behaviour
Orwell’s attitude to women and feminism is intertwined with his emphatic
virility. His prejudice against women and his stance against feminism on the one
hand, and his homophobia, mixed with hints of repressed homoeroticism and a
repulsion from effeminate and soft men on the other hand may as well be the
two sides of the same coin, an “unmitigated masculinity” in Woolfian terms. A
strong will, courage, heroism, commitment, self-sacrifice and self-restraint are
all virtues associated with masculinity of which Orwell set an outstandingly
good example. They ensured him a safe niche in society and literary reputation
and they in his lifetime gave him reassurance that he was not a failure, a sense of
40
Ivett Császár
which had stalked him from childhood. Through action, being the opposite of
feminine passivity, he projected a virile image of himself in service of the
common good and common man with much moral sermonising supporting his
quest. The snivelling boy of “Such, Such Were the Joys” who had neither guts
nor character and who was doomed to be a failure became a writer much
obsessed with manliness and toughness, who made a habit of lashing out at
fellow intellectuals reluctant to act and who went out of his way to prove to
himself that he had the guts. He had the guts to descend among the outcasts, he
had the guts to fight and get wounded in Spain, he always had the guts to
disclose brutal truths regardless of the side on which he stood, and in
Cunningham’s words “the criticism of Orwell, veteran of the notoriously
ferocious Eton College wall game, had nothing if not the guts” (66). In his eyes,
Auden was “a sort of gutless Kipling” (CW 5, 170) and the intelligentsia did not
really understand that “to survive you often have to fight and to fight you often
have to dirty yourself” (CEJL 2, 250) and that however demanding it may be,
“life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort” (CW 5, 183-184). Thus, it is
no wonder that insulted, not surprisingly often pacifist, intellectuals came to
regard Orwell as “the preacher of Physical Courage as an Asset to the left-wing
intellectual” (CEJL 2, 225).
He spoke to a male audience and his world was not one in which women
could be ascribed a stance equal to that of men. Virginia Woolf’s judgement on
Kipling’s writings seems to be applicable to Orwell: “they celebrate male
virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men” (92). This is
especially true with respect to his non-fiction, where he wrote about male
(primarily male because public) concerns for male readers. In his favourite
phrase, “common man”, man was not a substitute for people but really excluded
the common woman. In his vocabulary masculine and feminine bore value
judgements, associating the former with strength, courage and action and the
latter with passivity and softness. The ideal colloquial language of the ordinary
man for which a writer according to him had to strive was not only clear, visual
and concrete, but, quite importantly, though somewhat less directly alluded to,
vigorous and masculine. His writing unquestionably implies that in his outlook
the human norm was masculine, using the word ‘feminine’ mostly with a
pejorative connotation.
The posthumous cult of Orwell as an ideal of proper masculine behaviour
emerged primarily on the basis of obituaries and studies by male friends and
critics. In compliance with Orwell’s emphatic masculinity, as John Rodden
observes, the Orwell cult is in part a cult of masculinity. It is worth quoting him
at some length:
The masculine voice of Orwell’s prose, his association of moral
courage with physical courage, his own ‘manly’ example that
socialism is something to fight and die for, his railing against the
‘softness’ of a machine civilisation, his emphasis on ‘hard’ experience
Orwell and Women’s Issues
41
rather than theory and jargon, his conviction that one could be a
socialist and yet be an ‘ordinary’ man, his Quixotic capacity to act:
Orwell the man and writer projected a virile image, especially
attractive to radical male intellectuals of a generation naively
worshipful of ‘common’ men of action. Indeed part of his appeal has
always been his capacity to make intellectual life seem manly, not
effeminate, a calling of unusual adventure, larger than life. Male
intellectuals have therefore projected their own dreams onto him,
romanticizing his life as the saga of a world-historical individual
somehow managing to touch all the major currents of his age, from
poverty to imperialism to fascism. In all this Orwell has seemed the
quintessential public writer – and the public sphere is the one to which
men have traditionally felt called and compelled (225. Italics in the
original).
Orwell’s markedly masculine stance has been rewarded by male readers. As
Rodden notes, the critics, who played the largest role in his reputation building
and, more importantly, for whom Orwell stood as an intellectual model, have
been men. For them Orwell was not just a “political or generational exemplar”, a
figure whose ethos guided them in all urgent public issues of their day, but an
“inspirational gender model” to which they might as well have been blind: “male
critics have been peculiarly silent as to the significance of Orwell’s reputation
among male intellectuals and his special masculine appeal” (Rodden 212). Their
silence might have been due to their being unaware of this factor in Orwell’s
appeal, just as Orwell was probably unconscious of his own emphatic
masculinity. The recognition of masculinity on the part of some critics was not
coupled with a critical stance either.
Quite to the contrary, Paul Potts, for instance, in his “Quixote on a Bicycle”
assures his one-time friend of unconditional praise for everything he was,
including his unquestionable masculinity. “He was very masculine; not
necessarily a bad thing in a man, but in the sense that he was every inch a man,
and not in the sense that he was a penny-halfpenny trying to be tuppence” (Potts
250). However, the exaltation of masculinity gains an unpleasant taste when it
becomes the ideal in opposition to femininity, as when Potts goes on to applaud
Orwell’s kindness: “He was kind looking but it was a masculine kindness – most
kindness isn’t” (Potts 250). Christopher Hitchens, intent on saving Orwell from
feminist claws, argues that if “viewed with discrimination”, Orwell’s prejudice
turns out to be against “the sexless woman, or the woman who has lost her sex
and become shrivelled and/or mannish” (150). Without supporting his view from
Orwell’s text, he comments on the phenomenon as being an “old male trope”
and adds that it conforms to Orwell’s wider dislike of anything ‘unnatural’. The
quotation marks of the latter word reflects an awareness of the distinction
between biological and acquired social attributes but one wonders whether his
suspicion of Orwell’s being a captive of the ‘old male trope’ is not a revelation
42
Ivett Császár
of his own preferences. Self-revealing passages are to be found not only in
Orwell’s critical statements but also in the commentary of Orwell’s observers.
According to Rodden, “[j]ust as some of Orwell’s critical statements on Dickens,
Swift, Tolstoy, and Kipling tell us more about him than about them, observers’
comments on Orwell not infrequently amount less to literary criticism than to
self- and group-analysis” (9). Instead of sex – Orwell showed an interest in both
boyish as well as womanly women – it would have been cleverer of Hitchens to
argue in terms of gender: Orwell’s prejudice was more probably rooted in a fear
of the mix of social roles, as his hatred of feminists attests. His denouncement of
women taking up traditionally masculine roles like, as we will see, Lady
Rhondda and Lady Astor, as well as his criticism of men retreating into
traditionally female passivity or even softness is obviously linked to the
perception of gender roles rather than to preference for sexuality.
Dethronement by Feminism
The dragging of Orwell down from his pedestal was likely to happen after the
peak of the Orwell cult in the 1980s and that it was accomplished by feminist
criticism is – with some hindsight – reasonable. After all, Orwell’s views on
women seriously contradict his claim for the stature of a champion of decency
and moral fairness. The force of the beat of feminist criticism might be
explained by the fact that the hagiography which drew mainly on a selective
reading of his corpus concealed the quite fallible human being with his quite
contradictory and therefore overlooked statements in the background. His
shortcomings remained unchallenged for a long time: thus, the blow was all the
more forceful. Daphne Patai’s The Orwell Mystique of 1980, the first and only
book-long feminist critique of Orwell’s oeuvre, traced all of his shortcomings
back to his hypertrophied masculinity. Androcentrism, writes Patai, “unifies
Orwell’s diverse pet peeves, his fear of socialism and the machine, his nostalgia
for the past, his misogyny, his attraction to the experience of war, and the
conservatism apparent in his carefully circumscribed challenge to hierarchy and
inequality” (14). Beatrix Campbell in Wigan Pier Revisited, written in 1984, also
pointed out Orwell’s masculine concern, his focus on unemployment and
deprivation as phenomena concerning primarily the male members of the
population. She observed that the poor conditions of the industrial north
fascinated Orwell only in respect of male miners and the equally arduous female
labour deployed in the cotton industry avoided his attention.
John Rodden argues that beside the feminist inclination to ignore the
necessary priority of the issues of fascism, communism and economic
depression over the issues of gender in Orwell’s time, his exceptionally
unfortunate case with feminist critics could be due to his exalted status as a
champion of justice and decency. “How can one be a truly ‘popular’ hero,” asks
Rodden, “and not stand as the champion of half of humanity? Feminists across
the political spectrum ask, justly, about Orwell. [...] Fairly, or not, feminists have
Orwell and Women’s Issues
43
expected more of Orwell than of his contemporaries, they have wanted him to be
Trilling’s and Spender’s ‘extraordinary ordinary man’ on women’s issues too”
(224). And realising that he did not meet their expectations, their disappointment
has been strong. Heightened expectations, as always, have led to a more intense
feeling of resentment, giving way to absolute rejection: the feminist revision has
been the strongest challenge to Orwell’s reputation. The issues he was so
concerned with – politics, economy, poverty, class-distinctions – were ones
belonging to the public realm traditionally assigned to be dealt with and solved
by men and he displayed no sensitivity to the “petty disasters” of women, as he
termed women’s concerns in a review of a female author in 1946 (CW 18, 175).
The exclusion of ‘common woman’ from his notion of ‘common man’ was
not only a linguistic carelessness to which he was otherwise especially alert.
Consequently, “many women,” says Rodden, “cannot ‘read themselves into’
Orwell very easily. They come to him with the expectation that he speaks to ‘the
common reader’, only to find the dialogue virtually closed. His reader seems to
be the common male reader, and the disappointment is keen” (225). In the eyes
of feminists, Orwell’s blindness to women’s issues and his own emphatic
masculinity calls into question, perhaps even invalidates, his commitment to
social justice. Unfortunately, his exploration of racial and economic oppression
was never coupled with a revelation of gender polarisation, the values dictated
by his ‘democratic socialism’ failed to question the notion of male superiority. It
is this weakness which, feminists contend, invalidates his concern for social
justice. As Patai complains, his gender ideology “conflicts with his attacks on
hierarchy and injustice, which remain woefully incomplete, even hypocritical”
(“Despair” 88).
A Phobia of Feminism
There is no way of denying that Orwell did much to let feminists down. That he
was “not sensitive” to women’s rights, as Rodden puts it, is euphemistic for the
intolerance he displayed towards feminists and birth control supporters in his
time. In The Road to Wigan Pier he included feminists and “birth-control
fanatics” in his (in)famous list of “cranks” – fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sandalwearers, sex-maniacs, Quakers, ‘Nature Cure’ quacks and pacifists – all these
are assumed to be attracted with “magnetic force” to socialism, thereby
threatening its renown (CW 5, 161). No wonder that he invited the label “anticrank crank”. Roger Fowler points out that lists, or in Hakan Ringbom’s study of
Orwell’s language “series”, are highly typical of Orwell when passionate and
damning. The syntax of listing has a levelling effect, it implies that the items in
the list are much the same and using the plural forms of the items suggests a
highly stereotypical thinking. Fowler is very much critical on Orwell’s use of
lists:
44
Ivett Császár
The use of list structures [...] is an extreme and absurd technique of
criticism. Lists lack logic and discrimination. They reduce everything
to the same level, and therefore are offensive to some of things listed,
which quite obviously have merit outside of this context: Quakers and
tinned food, for instance. If Orwell is not making clear discriminations
in this list, it is because he is proceeding in a tone of raucous mockery;
it is, however, close to intemperance and intolerance (59).
Other disdainful remarks on feminists suggest that the inclusion of feminists in
the list was not only for the purpose of “raucous mockery.” In the dark vision of
the future he depicted in a letter to Brenda Salkeld in 1933 Orwell considered a
“fearful tribe” of feminists to be one of the threats to civilisation. He reflected on
two directions toward which the world could move: a complete overthrow of the
present order by means of a revolution or the continuing and consummate
hegemony of business accompanied by the feminists’ coming into power:
A few years ago I thought it rather fun to reflect that our civilisation is
doomed, but now it fills me above all else with boredom to think of the
horrors that will be happening within ten years – either some appalling
calamity, with revolution and famine, or else all-round trustification
and Fordification, with the entire population reduced to docile wageslaves, our lives utterly in the hands of the bankers, and a fearful tribe
of Lady Astors and Lady Rhonddas et hoc genus riding us like succubi
in the name of Progress (CW 10, 317).
It is worth giving the two ladies mentioned in this apocalyptic vision a more
objective assessment. Nancy Astor, the first woman to enter the House of
Commons, was a member of parliament throughout almost all of Orwell’s
career, from 1919 until 1945. She was an advocate of temperance and women’s
rights. She campaigned to lower the age for women’s suffrage to twenty one, for
equal rights in the Civil Service and was a supporter of the nursery schools of
Margaret McMillan. In the year when Nancy Astor took her seat in the House of
Commons, there was another woman candidate for a seat, even more scandalous,
in the august body of the House of Lords, Lady Rhondda, born Margaret Haig
Thomas. Having joined the Pankhursts’ organisation, the Women’s Social and
Political Union, and having carried out small acts of militancy in the fight for
women’s vote in the early 1900s, it was matter-of-course that Margaret Rhondda
should attempt to take the seat of her deceased father – with whom she was on
good terms and worked closely during the First World War – in the House of
Lords in 1919. The lords were, of course, terrified and quickly set up committees
to reject her claim. The House of Lords admitted women into its body only in
1958. In a debate between Lady Rhondda and G.K. Chesterton over the question
of the (un)desirability of leisured women in society, Bernard Shaw, the chair,
introduced Lady Rhondda as the terror of the House of Lords. “She is a peeress
Orwell and Women’s Issues
45
in her own right. She is also an extremely capable woman of business, and the
House of Lords has risen up and said, ‘If Lady Rhondda comes in here, we go
away!’ They feel there would be such a show-up of the general business
ignorance and imbecility of the male sex as never was before” (Quoted by
Eastman, Christian Science Monitor, 8 March 1920)
Viscount Rhondda had left to his daughter not only his title, but full
possession and control of his properties. She inherited an active place in the
financial world and she kept her feet. She was considered a talented and
successful businesswoman (CW 10, 317). In 1920 she founded an independent
weekly, Time and Tide, whose editing she took over from the initial editor in
1926. A large number of the contributors to the magazine were women: Vera
Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf, Crystal Eastman, Nancy Astor,
Emmeline Pankhurst, Olive Schreiner, Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay, Naomi
Mitchison, and Elisabeth Robins. As Margaret Rhondda put it in its first issue,
Time and Tide came into being in order to fill a gap in the press. The idea behind
it was to create “a paper which is in fact concerned neither specially with men
nor specially with women, but with human beings. [...] the press of today,
although with self-conscious, painstaking care it now inserts ‘and women’ every
time it chances to use the word ‘men’ scarcely succeeds in attaining to such an
ideal!” (Time and Tide, 14 May 1920) Though the magazine must have lost
some of its early feminist zeal as the Second World War loomed, there is some
irony in the fact that Orwell found his first war-time job in 1940 as a regular
movie and theatre reviewer for this, in its hay-day, feminist periodical.
Not belying the link between patriotism and a profound interest in
population policy, his increasing patriotism during the Second World War made
Orwell all the more adamant on birth control, a main issue of feminism. As a
mitigating circumstance Rodden emphasises the importance of evaluating
Orwell’s stance against contraception within the larger context of raging
eugenics in the first decades of the century. The eugenic propagation for
selective breeding and the sterilisation of the C3 population promoted by such
controversial figures as Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger definitely brought
discredit on the contraception campaign, but it does not justify Orwell’s
understanding of procreation as a public issue to be handled on the basis of the
needs of the nation. Such a point of view emerges from assessing the population
as a source of power, which beside Malthusianism and Eugenics, has been one
of the main anti-individual discourses trespassing on women’s reproductive
rights (Yuval-Davis 34).
Furthermore, it cannot at all be claimed with certainty that Orwell was more
than superficially familiar with the movement. His disparagement of “birthcontrol fanatics” might refer to Marie Stopes but that he “evidently equated the
movement with Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger” as Rodden claims, is only a
conjecture, with no evidence in Orwell’s texts. He never put the names of these
two women or the word ‘eugenics’ down on paper. The awareness of his lifelong
preoccupation with people of disadvantageous background invites one to
46
Ivett Császár
surmise that familiarity with slogans promoting the curtailment of unwanted
population would have set his hypersensitivity to abuse in action. Stopes was
shining in Britain in the 1910s and 20s, by the 30s she was fading as opposition
to her extreme position hardened. By the time Orwell pronounced his anticontraception stance, her activities – though not their effects – were a thing of
the past. The only vague reference by Orwell to eugenics justifies it: “Thirty
years ago, even ten or fifteen years ago, to advocate smaller families was a mark
of enlightenment. The key phrases were ‘surplus population’ and ‘the
multiplication of the unfit’” (CW 19, 82).
Orwell’s anti-contraception stance was not so much a demonstration against
“birth-control fanatics” as a result of an essentially public-minded and
conservative way of thinking, looking upon child-bearing mainly as a source of
national vitality. In “The English People” he expressed anxiety about the
dwindling English birth-rate – in times of war a logical and expected reaction for
a public-minded patriot. He proposed the classical remedy: encouraging child
bearing through favourable economic policies, including lightened taxation:
The philoprogenitive instinct will probably return when fairly large
families are already the rule, but the first steps towards this must be
economic ones. [...] Any government, by a few strokes of the pen,
could make childlessness as unbearable an economic burden as a big
family is now: but no government has chosen to do so, because of the
ignorant idea that a bigger population means more unemployed. Far
more drastically than anyone has proposed hitherto, taxation will have
to be graded so as to encourage child-bearing and to save women with
young children from being obliged to work outside the home (CW 16,
223).
His proposal for child-friendly measures (kindergartens, play-grounds, bigger
and more convenient flats, free education) was unfortunately coupled with the
idea of keeping women beside the stove, harsher penalties for abortion and a
disapproval of the tendency to avoid the drudgery a large family imposes on
women. Orwell’s concern was demographically adequate breeding and lacked
any consideration of procreation as a private matter of individuals. Being
anxious for his country in the shadow of the threateningly increasing population
of Nazi Germany, he regarded birth-control and abortion as impediments to the
growth of the English population. The thought that these means are devices for
women to control their own bodies and lives apparently never occurred to him.
Orwell’s proposals in “The English People” are, according to Woodcock,
“probably the most truly reactionary he ever made, including such familiar
devices as the crushing penal taxation of childless people and a more rigorous
repression of abortion. It shows Orwell at his most authoritarian, but it also
shows an aspect of his thought which cannot be ignored” (261).
Orwell and Women’s Issues
47
But What is the Matter with Women?
Feminism aside, having an aversion for the movement, its concerns and for some
of its members does not explain away Orwell’s often expressly contemptuous
attitude towards women. Rodden is incorrect when he criticises feminists on the
grounds that their charges of Orwell’s misogyny and contempt for women
“equate his scattered comments dismissive of feminism with woman-hatred in
general” (213). It should not be blurred that Orwell belittled women. That his
condescension to women can be deduced from scattered remarks only, does not
invalidate the criticism; just as the irregularity of his dismissive remarks about
‘Jews’ does not exempt him from the charge of his having an anti-Semitic
attitude in spite of his declared stance against anti-Semitism. While he knew
better than to consciously differentiate based on race or religion, nevertheless,
his irritation at Jewish habits justifies his friend Malcolm Muggeridge’s
conjecture that he was “inclined at times to be vaguely anti-Semitic”
(Muggeridge 172).
What shall we think of ‘scattered’ remarks like “[o]ne of the surest signs of
his [Joseph Conrad’s] genius is that women dislike his books” (CEJL 1, 227), or
“[d]oubtless Gissing is right in implying all through his books that intelligent
women are very rare animals, and if one wants to marry a woman who is
intelligent and pretty, then the choice is still further restricted, according to a
well-known arithmetical rule. It is like being allowed to choose only among
albinos, and left-handed albinos at that” (CEJL 4, 431). In our day, when the
historical situation allows us to deal with luxuries like the position of women in
society, such statements do sound grievous, and there is something to be said
against them even if we take the different historical context into consideration.
Though feminist criticism has often run to extremes on Orwell’s misogyny, it
was undeniably Orwell who occasioned the charge.
Facing the charge of misogyny, Rodden warns the reader not to overlook
Orwell’s respectful comments about feminism and women’s issues, which,
drawing on Arthur Eckstein’s observation, were on the rise from the mid-1940s,
while, at the same time, his condescending remarks about feminism and
women’s capacities diminished greatly (436, n97). Rodden points out that
Orwell reviewed Hilda Martindale’s From One Generation to Another in 1944
and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in 1945 favourably. His praise of
Martindale’s book is indeed unrestrained but is mainly directed at Martindale’s
efforts as a factory inspector to expose the atrocious working conditions into
which employers forced their female and child labourers until almost the
beginning of the Great War. The blunt truth-teller about the working conditions
of male labourers in Wigan could not but welcome Martindale, who gave
attention to female employees as well, all the more so since she had “none of the
bitter anti-masculine feeling that feminist writers used to have.” He solemnly
concluded that Martindale’s “own career, and the self-confidence and
independent outlook that she evidently showed from the very start, bear out the
48
Ivett Császár
claim that women are the equals of men in everything except physical strength”
(CW 17, 271). Unfortunately, the declaration of such a statement ironically
bespeaks of a need to be reminded of or convinced by it.
Orwell lavished much less praise on Woolf’s book, which has, of course,
become a substantive text of feminist criticism. Noting the central argument of
Woolf’s book, the need for women to have financial independence, Orwell cuts
his review short and disregards the myriad implications of Woolf’s refined text.
He concludes that “[a]t times this book rather overstates the drawbacks from
which women suffer, but almost anyone of the male sex could read it with
advantage” (CW 17, 288). Patai draws attention to the “uncharacteristically
circumspect and wary tone” of the review, “he neither engages the book nor
strongly contradicts its premises. He is clearly on his guard” (20). Rodden notes
that Orwell’s positive statements – including these reviews – are from the mid1940s, supporting the impression that Orwell’s views on women’s issues,
“though they hardly became progressive, were not static throughout his life”
(437, n112). Rodden ascribes the “evolution of his attitudes” possibly to his
marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy and the adoption of their son. Taking a few
positive comments to be an evolution of attitudes, however, disregards the
ongoing undercurrent of Orwell’s negative attitude towards women and
feminism, which came to the surface from time to time even after he had made
concessions. Just after he had been convinced by Martindale’s book and
personality that women were not inferior to men, he began shilly-shallying again
when he found in a privately conducted sociological ‘survey’ that women could
not pass the intelligence test:
Here is a little problem sometimes used as an intelligence test.
A man walked four miles due south from his house and shot a bear. He
then walked two miles due west, then walked another four miles due
north and was back at his home again. What was the colour of the
bear?
The interesting point is that – so far as my own observations go – men
usually see the answer to this problem and women do not (CW 16,
277).
In the spring of 1945 as a war correspondent he had the opportunity to observe
the municipal elections in France, in which women voted for the first time in
French history. Though the caption of his article for the Manchester Evening
News promises some discussion of this historic event, it cannot be argued that
Orwell attributes too much significance to it. Indeed, rather to the contrary, his
speculations imply an anxiety at the forthcoming results of women’s “venture
into public life.” “By far the most important unknown factor is the attitude of the
women,” he writes. Drawing a mysterious connection between the Church and
women, he worries that “[i]t is possible that the Church may as in the past, make
an authoritative pronouncement against certain political doctrines, especially
Orwell and Women’s Issues
49
Communism: in which case the large female vote might be a very serious
handicap for the parties of the Left” (CW 17, 126). Three weeks later he covered
the elections for the Observer, informing the British that the results showed a
general leftward slide. His anxieties and predictions were not justified – he was
silent about these just as about women’s participation in the vote at all.
In a review of D.H. Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer he deduces from one
of the stories, “The White Stocking”, the simple moral that “women behave
better if they get a sock on the jaw occasionally” (CW 17, 386). Apropos of
Orwell’s “Books v. Cigarettes”, which appeared in Tribune in February 1946, a
correspondent justly suspects him of an exclusively male perspective. Intending
to examine the question whether low book-consumption is due to the high price
of books, Orwell compares reading habits mainly to traditionally male sparetime activities: drinking, smoking, going to the dogs, and the pub. Joyce
Sharpey-Shafer wonders whether since women and children “don’t appear to
need beer and cigarettes as much as men” did that mean he implied they did not
need books either (CW 18, 97)? In describing his ideal pub, the Moon Under
Water, Orwell displays a similarly male-centric, somewhat paternalistic attitude.
The Moon Under Water is an unmistakably nineteenth-century public house in
appearance: “its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly
Victorian” with grained woodwork, open fires burning in the bars (a separate
one for women) – its atmosphere and mentality are similarly Victorian. The
motherly barmaids are middle-aged women, who call everyone dear, irrespective
of age and sex. The greatest asset of the pub is its garden, where the family
members can entertain themselves while Dad is having his fun. The garden
“allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and
mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.” Believing this to be progressiveminded (“It is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children – and therefore, to
some extent, women – from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing
shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be” [CW 18,
100]), he only fits the need of the family to that of the husband.
An assumption of male superiority is inherent in his citation of Babylonian
marriage customs in the columns of Tribune (June 1944). He quotes a passage
from the Penguin version of Herodotus, which gives an account of the system
the Babylonians designed to portion out maidens of marriageable age:
Once a year in each village the maidens of an age to marry were
collected altogether into one place, while the men stood round them in
a circle. Then the herald called up the damsels one by one and offered
them for sale. He began with the most beautiful. When she was sold
for no small sum of money, he offered for sale the one who came next
to her in beauty […] The custom was that when the herald had gone
through the whole number of the beautiful damsels, he should then call
up the ugliest and offer her to the men, asking who would agree to take
her with the smallest marriage portion. And the man who offered to
50
Ivett Császár
take the smallest sum had her assigned to him. The marriage portions
were furnished by the money paid for the beautiful damsels, and thus
the fairer maidens portioned out the uglier (CW 16, 246).
Unfortunately, Orwell does not elucidate his standpoint on the issue or what his
point is at all in setting forth this old patriarchal custom, which flies in the face
of the concept of the emancipation of women in the 19th and 20th centuries. The
two sentences he adds as a kind of comment and conclusion are ambiguous and
uninformative on his assessment of the custom: “This custom seems to have
worked very well and Herodotus is full of enthusiasm for it. He adds, however,
that, like other good customs, it was already going out round about 450 B.C.”
(CW 16, 247). Does he approve of the positive discrimination with which the
design helped to even out the inequalities of nature and portioned out the ugly
maidens with money received for the beautiful ones? Even if he can be credited
with such an egalitarian spirit, the question remains whether he noticed the
subordinate relation of human beings inherent in the custom at all. In a letter to
David Astor in 1948 he again gave evidence of his doubtful concept of human
relations along gender lines. Drawing a comparison between horses and humans,
he wrote to Astor: “Bobbie [Astor’s horse] is here & in good form. He is bigger
than the other horse, Bill’s mare, & oppresses her a great deal, but she likes
being with him, which I suppose shows that women like that kind of thing
really” (CW 19, 485).
Significantly, all the examples, mentioned above, of Orwell’s inherent
assumption of male superiority are from the mid-1940s, which does not lend
support to Rodden’s claims about an evolution in his attitude. Though Orwell
summed up his time spent at the BBC during the war as two wasted years (from
August 1941 to November 1943) and he came to be very critical of the BBC’s
influence on young artists (describing the organisation as “a mixture of
whoreshop and lunatic asylum”), it brought him into contact with a wide range
of his literary contemporaries, as well as scientists, historians, and politicians.
The programmes he had to produce included talks on science, art, politics, and
religion, such as discussions of The Social Contract, The Koran, Das Kapital,
social problems including minority issues, issues of colour, and the status of
women – and because of these he was probably forced to think over some of his
ideas. He was alerted, for example, to the delicate issue of the naming of
nationalities by the Eurasian writer Cedric Dover. Whereas earlier he admittedly
found pleasure in annoying the Scottish by referring to them as “Scotchmen”,
during and after his employment at the BBC he emphasised the importance of
avoiding insulting nicknames on several occasions and went through Burmese
Days to change troublesome nationality designations to politically correct ones
before the reprinting of his book. However, the impetus was not an internal
incentive but an adjustment to external expectations, therefore, a relapse into an
old habit was to be expected. In “Revenge is Sour”, written for Tribune in
November 1945, he dwelt on the absurdity of revengeful emotions occasioned
Orwell and Women’s Issues
51
by the sight of a Jewish Viennese officer getting his own revenge for his people
on the Nazis by kicking a captured SS-officer. Criticising the little attention
Orwell ever paid to the holocaust and its aftermath, Tosco Fyvel did not conceal
his indignation at Orwell’s designation of the Viennese officer as “the Jew” and
“the little Jew” right through the article (180).
The BBC might have exerted some influence on his views on women’s
issues as well. Contemplating the possible relation of Yeats’ political
conservatism and his leaning towards occultism, Orwell claims that “[t]hose who
dread the prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought,
emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults”
(CW 14, 282). Universal suffrage and emancipation of women are very
unorwellian concerns, what’s more, the terms are rarely if ever used in his
writings. By the time Orwell wrote the review on Yeats, he had been working
for a year and a half at the BBC, where – among others – he was responsible for
organising the talks of “The Cradle and the Desk”, a series discussing the
emancipation of women. In describing the programme to Ethel Mannin in a 1942
invitation to her, however, he included his personal reservations about the need
for and (male) desirability of women’s emancipation: “This, of course, is a
subject of great interest in India, and roughly what we want discussed is how far
women benefit by escaping from home and whether in the long run it is
desirable for them to undertake the same work as men” (CW 13, 474). Just as the
BBC – through the people he met there and worked with – might have prompted
him to think twice about nationalities, he might have been impelled to conform
to progressive views on issues of gender. However, beside the quite few positive
statements, denigrating phrases kept popping up from time to time just as in the
1930s, which suggests that, running counter to the assumption of a developing
attitude, his ideas basically remained unchanged. Negative statements,
unfortunately, weigh more heavily than positive ones, they even tend to
invalidate or considerably decrease the honesty of the latter. What is more, the
upheaval of patriotic feeling triggered by the Second World War involved, as the
final part of this paper will show, acceptance of the regressive gender policy of
mainstream society and a confirmation of traditional gender roles.
National Loyalty, Popular Culture and All That Follow
Orwell’s patriotic transformation at the outbreak of the Second World War
precipitated a commitment to majority society and his writings on English
popular culture can be seen as the by-product of his new ideological identity as a
socialist patriot (Rai 101). After a tradition of elitist assumptions about the rigid
categories of high and low culture, Orwell’s initiative to study popular art
seriously, and thereby bridge the gulf between the intellectual and the common
man, is now seen as a radical change in outlook. An important legacy of Orwell
for popular culture criticism, says Rodden, was to demonstrate how popular art
offered insight into the public mind and to alert readers to ideologies underlying
52
Ivett Császár
such works of art (233). Whereas having a sharp eye, as always, for political
tendencies, Orwell pointed out the conservative outlook inherent in popular
culture, for example, in popular boys’ weeklies (The Gem and The Magnet); his
reception of music hall comedies and seaside postcards suggests that he was
blind to the equally conservative and regressive gender policy underlying much
of the humour of popular culture. In the review of Applesauce for Time and Tide
in 1940, he insists on the importance of the continued existence of the Max
Miller-type English comedian, who specialises in “utter baseness”: “They
express something which is valuable in our civilisation and which might drop
out of it in certain circumstances” (CW 12, 253). Beside lowness and vulgarity,
their great virtue is that “their genius is entirely masculine” and “they are
intensely national”. Vulgarity is an exclusively masculine (perhaps even virile)
virtue – “a woman cannot be low without being disgusting” (CW 12, 253).
Something similar is suggested by Orwell’s lament that “English humour was
being ‘purified’ for the benefit of a new, largely feminine, public” in his 1949
review of The English Comic Album (CW 20, 12).
An analysis of the comic seaside postcards of Donald McGill, which
appeared in Horizon in 1941 and was reprinted in Critical Essays in 1946, gave
Orwell an opportunity to relegate men and women to their appropriate tasks and
roles in life. The examination of the postcards is launched by calling for the
cooperation of the imaginary reader: “Get hold of a dozen of these things,”
“spread them out on a table,” What do you see?” “What do these things remind
you of?” “What are they so like?” are the imperatives and interrogatives marking
the dialogic stance – of course answers are provided to the questions to guide the
reader to the preferred point of view: “Your first impression is of overpowering
vulgarity. […] Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity”
(CW 13, 24). Roger Fowler notes that the orders and schoolmasterly questions
suggest an “energetic interrogator who is putting great pressure on the reader to
agree with Orwell’s interpretation of this cultural phenomenon” (45).
After a neutral, even critical, analysis of outlook, content, typical subject
matter, language and target audience of comic postcards, the essay in the second
half develops into a highly subjective assessment of the virtues the postcards are
intended to represent – indeed the last passages constitute an ode to, and defence
of, their “overpowering vulgarity”, their “ever-present obscenity” and their
“utter lowness of mental atmosphere.” The woman with the stuck-out behind,
the voluptuous figure with the body-hugging dress and with breasts and buttocks
grossly over-emphasised is a dominant, recurrent motif of the postcards even
when the joke has nothing to do with sex. “There can be no doubt,” concludes
Orwell, “that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural
enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim to the point of
skimpishness” (CW 13, 27). But here Orwell makes a distinction between the
McGill postcards and papers like The Esquire and La Vie Parisienne. Whereas
the humour of McGill’s postcards only gains meaning with a strict moral code in
the background, the imaginary background of the jokes in The Esquire and La
Orwell and Women’s Issues
53
Vie Parisienne is promiscuity, “the utter breakdown of all standards” (CW 13,
27). Bound up with this, says Orwell, is the tendency of the well-to-do, Esquiretype women to prolong their youth and preserve their sexual attraction with
cosmetics and the avoidance of child-bearing. As opposed to this, “youth’s a
stuff will not endure” is the normal attitude, the “ancient wisdom” that McGill
reflects by allowing no transition figures between the honeymoon couple and the
glamourless Mum and Dad. Expecting a drop in the standard of living (in 1941
with due reason) and a rise in the birth-rate, Orwell is looking forward to the
retreat of young-at-forty, face-lifted ladies and the reappearance of drudges
exhausted by housework and a succession of child-beds. “When it comes to the
pinch,” writes Orwell, “human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the
scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber,
battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash” (CW
13, 30). The McGill postcards, concludes Orwell, are a sort of rebellion against
virtue and the seriousness of life. The Sancho Panza element in man, “the lazy,
cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer” cannot entirely be suppressed and will find an
outlet from time to time: “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not
too good, and not quite all the time” (CW 13, 30).
The world Orwell envisages with overly good human beings is a sharply
divided world with heroic men acting, fighting and dying glorified in the public
realm and equally heroic women accomplishing their less noble task of bearing
children, scrubbing with their brushes (implying the assumption that the two
necessarily go hand in hand) and ending their lives quietly, deprived of any
exploit deserving the attention of posterity. The McGill postcards invert this
order for a moment, but, quite significantly, only with respect to men. The jokes
reveal the unofficial self, whose “tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work,
pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your
fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your
wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth” (CW 13, 29). Apart from being
self-contradictory by acknowledging a wish for promiscuity condemned in the
world of The Esquire and La Vie Parisienne, rebellion is only seen from a male
perspective. In the nature of the momentary wish of women facing “childbed and
the scrubbing brush” Orwell was not interested, or perhaps it did not occur to
him, that they could have such momentary wishes at all. If McGill’s postcards
primarily addressed men, Orwell surely did not question or even find it peculiar
enough to mention. He accepted uncritically the sexual stereotypes and gender
ideology underlying the majority of such post cards.
George Woodcock in The Crystal Spirit shrewdly establishes a link
between the McGill postcard image of worn-out housewives and the prole
woman hanging out her washing in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith feels a
“mystical reverence” for the woman tormented but not crushed down by her
share of life.
54
Ivett Császár
The woman down there has no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm
heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had
given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary
flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had
suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and
coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning,
cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for
children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end
of it she was still singing (CW 9, 229).
The idealisation of the self-sacrificing maternal woman affirms Orwell’s
adherence to a society based on sexual polarisation. As long as the woman bears
and rears children, there is no risk of her interfering with the man’s world and
thereby threatening his privileges. Patai is right in observing that Orwell “lives
in a mental space peopled largely by men, with women providing the domestic
background for the activities of men, breeding and rearing the next generation,
and of course valorizing the masculine role by embodying a contrasting and
inferiorized feminity” (249).
Conclusion
Far from precipitating an evolution of his attitude to women and feminism,
Orwell’s turn towards the nation, held together by essentially conserving forces,
like tradition, national customs, culture, the family, and virtues like commitment,
self-sacrifice, courage; this volte-face deepened his adherence to a normative
society that assigns well-defined roles to men and women and shows intolerance
towards phenomena and people not fitting its requirements. George L. Mosse
points out that the stepping over of the boundaries of roles poses a hazard to a
society whose functioning depends on the acceptance and prevalence of a
traditional value system in which masculine values like honour, loyalty and the
submission of the individual to higher goals are a main force (12). In this sense
masculinity and the adherence to traditional masculine values, according to
Mosse, is a conservative phenomenon and restricts individual freedom. Smelling
abnormal or unconventional manners and behaviour, like those involved in
feminism or homosexuality, manliness “pulls in the reins”, strengthens the
conventional, the years between the two world wars being an especially
regressive period from such an aspect (Mosse 168). Orwell was unfortunately no
exception to the period that Cunningham describes as being well immersed in
misogyny. Though keen on collecting grievances and hypersensitive to abuse
wherever he found it, be it imperial oppression in India or political terror in
Spain, he was not perceptive to the much subtler abuses involved in gender
polarisation. The curve from a terror of a “fearful tribe” of feminists to the
uncritical acceptance of the male perspective of popular culture is not much of
Orwell and Women’s Issues
55
an evolution of attitude deserving defence, not even if the recognition of this
aspect of Orwell’s ethos involves our being deprived of an intellectual hero.
Works Cited
Campbell, Beatrix. Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties.
London: Virago, 1984.
Coppard, Audrey & Crick, Bernard eds. Orwell Remembered. London: BBC,
1984.
Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Eastman, Crystal. Christian Science Monitor. 8 March 1920.
Web. 4 Nov. 2010. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whaig.htm>
Fowler, Roger. The Language of George Orwell. London: MacMillan, 1995.
Fyvel, T. R. George Orwell: A Personal Memoir. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Gross, Miriam ed. The World of George Orwell. London: Weidenfeld-Nicolson,
1972.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity.
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Muggeridge, Malcolm. “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance.” The World of
George Orwell. Ed. Gross, Miriam. London: Weidenfeld-Nicolson, 1972,
165-177.
Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Vol. 1-4. Ed.
Orwell, Sonia and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc,
1968.
Orwell, George. The Complete Works. Vol. 1-20. Ed. Davison, Peter. London:
Secker and Warburg, 1998.
Patai, Daphne. “Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope: Gender and Power in
Dystopia.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol.7. No.2. (1984):
85-95.
Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
Potts, Paul. “Quixote on a Bicycle.” Orwell Remembered. Ed. Coppard, Audrey
and Bernard Crick. London: BBC, 1984, pp. 248-260.
Rai, Alok. Orwell and the Politics of Despair. A Critical Study of the Writings of
George Orwell. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Rhondda, Margaret. Time and Tide. 14 May 1920.
Web. 4 Nov. 2010. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whaig.htm>
Ringbom, Hakan. “George Orwell as Essayist: A Stylistic Study.” Acta
Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A Humaniora, Vol.44, No.2. Abo Akademi,
1973, 1-78.
56
Ivett Császár
Rodden, John. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of
‘St George’ Orwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit. London: Fourth Estate, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. Nem és nemzet. Budapest: ÚMK, 2005.